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The Cisco Consumer Group, which handles Linksys routers and Flip camcorders, is planning to increase its retail footprint from the existing 2,000 retailers to 4,000 retailers in the next 12 months.
Said Suresh Balasubramanian, National Sales Director, Cisco Consumer Products India, “With the increasing broadband penetration in the country we see huge opportunity for us as well as for our partners. With 3G and WiMax services to be launched in the country soon, broadband will be everywhere. There’s already huge demand for broadband in tier-3 and tier-4 cities, and once these services are rolled out, there’ll be an enormous market for us to address. Even the given broadband penetration of about 4 percent is a market opportunity for us.”
Putting more thrust on the home networking market, Cisco recently launched four new routers—Wireless-N Home Router WRT120N, Wireless-N Home ADSL2+ Modem Router WAG120N, Wireless-N Broadband Router with Storage Link WRT160NL, and Wireless-N Access Point with Dual-Band WAP610N.
In order to achieve its plans, Cisco will initially focus on increasing partner penetration in the 40 large cities that it already sells in. In the second phase the company will look at expanding into tier-3 and tier-4 cities; the sub-distributors in each region will be responsible for this. They will also be responsible for taking care of any channel conflict that may arise from the increased number of partners in the region.
Linksys products are currently distributed through Redington and Compuage. Meanwhile, Cisco is also seeing increasing revenue from LFR stores. The company is increasing its focus on LFRs with more in-store training for sales representatives.
Cisco has also devised a no-repair policy for all its routers in order to woo customers. The company already has eight product exchange centers in the country, and has opened another eight this month in Nagpur, Indore, Surat, Vadodara, Panaji, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Jaipur. The norepair policy also relieves the company from the repair overheads on the low-cost routers that start from Rs 1,200.
In addition, Cisco is increasing the intensity of its training programs for retailers. “We will run at least one program each month in the top 16 cities. We have started using technologies such as telepresence and WebEx to conduct trainings. In order to improve training in smaller cities, we are working on building online training tools,” informed Balasubramanian.
For its Flip range of HD camcorders that start from $199, the company is currently conducting a consumer study in India to decide its go-to-market. |